Blackwater CEO admits he was CIA agent

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The founder and CEO of private security company Blackwater has revealed he worked as a CIA spy and carried out a number of secret missions before being fired by the Obama administration. Erik Prince, who heads Blackwater Worldwide, recently renamed Xe, gave a rare interview to Vanity Fair magazine, in which he revealed that his relationship with the CIA was not only that of an operations contractor, but also that of an asset, that is, a spy. Prince’s revelation will not surprise seasoned intelligence observers; as I commented last August, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish any operational demarcations between the CIA and the company formerly known as Blackwater. However, the mercenary company’s leading role in controversial CIA plans to assassinate high-level foreign officials was seen as a step too far by the new CIA leadership of Leon Panetta. The new Director canceled the program and informed Congress, which had been kept in the dark all along. It now appears that, in addition to terminating the assassination program, Panetta also dropped Erik Prince from the CIA’s payroll, in an effort to sever the Agency’s ties with the company that had been awarded over a billion dollars-worth of government contracts by the Bush Administration. But Xe’s CEO appears to be unhappy about the termination of his CIA asset status. In his interview with Vanity Fair he complained about those who “disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it” to the media, and compared his plight to that of exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson. “[W]hen it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus”, he complained.